Imagination and atmosphere in spades … a still from the game Sunless Skies.
Photograph: Failbetter Games

Depending on what you want from it, Sunless Skies is a merciless odyssey of oddball sci-fi survival, or a fantasy novel trilogy’s worth of wild, written ideas. You’re the captain of a spacefaring locomotive, braving cosmic fiends, blunderbuss-toting pirate trains and encroaching madness as you explore a darkly fantastical British empire’s faltering colonisation of the malevolent stars. Travel is slow, lonely and lethal: your crew is at constant risk of starvation, your hull at constant risk of destruction and your mind at constant risk of snapping.

At each dock you pull into, an assortment of strange characters awaits. Each has their own unexpected short stories to tell – if you can draw them out by meeting their demands or passing tests of chance. The frequently twisted flights of both fancy and language in these tales are delightful. Characters and places burrow their way into your memory thanks to acid-tongued words or unexpected twists – secrets, lies, diseases, murders, devils.

Sunless Skies’ static images and few screens of text achieve more than the most big-budget cinematics usually used in game storytelling. Once in a while, the writing seems more interested in showing off than entertaining, but the game’s makers clearly understand that inventiveness, not death by thesaurus, is the key to a setting as memorable as this. Theirs is a world creeping with unsettling detail, horror and black humour.

Your desperate voyages between ports serve primarily as delivery mechanisms for this feast of fables, though trying to keep a frail vessel alive while ferrying revenue-earning boxes between ports is a little galling. Whether you find this chugging back and forth across space to be atmospheric or a looping bore depends greatly on your state of mind: this is a game about gradually and fearfully charting a vast, hostile space, not brashly conquering it. And there are wonderful and terrible sights out in the farthest reaches, from clockwork suns and shattered stars to city-sized flowers.

Sunless Skies doesn’t paint an entirely convincing picture of interplanetary travel. Your locomotive, for instance, sails between points on a flat surface, giving it the feel of seafaring with a cosmic paint job. But better to compromise there than in style, imagination and atmosphere. Sunless Skies has that in spades.